by Poetry Editor Tamiko Beyer from Meritage Press
RELEASE PARTY SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 27th (details)
The poetic sequence bough breaks sets out to interrogate queer motherhood, implications of gender, and the politics of adoption.
"Tamiko Beyer understands the uncanny spirit of the lullaby. She wields her lyric power deftly, taking words like 'being, 'parent,' and 'poet,' and splintering their meaning. She skillfully breaks and resets form, creating poems that are terse, tender and ultimately, enduring."
—Tisa Bryant
"Tamiko Beyer does not separate the experience of a gendered body from genres of thought. This writing lies down between poetry and theory and makes a bed there, a bed of textured experience and fabulous rhythms."
—Kazim Ali
by DB Blogger & Contributor Sommer Browning from Birds, LLC
Sometimes I think Sommer Browning is a James Wright for the basic cable generation, at others the gorgeously deformed lovechild of H.D. and Groucho Marx. What I mean is I cannot categorize these poems, and that’s the highest compliment I can give any poetry.
—Mathias Svalina
The first hundred copies sold come with a fake, unpoisoned, tattoo designed by Sommer Browning.
RELEASE PARTY FRIDAY, JANUARY 28th (details)
by DB12 poet Gray Jacobik from CavanKerry Press
A highly personal memoir in verse from acclaimed poet Gray Jacobik, LITTLE BOY BLUE charts the intertwined lives of the poet and her son, born under difficult circumstances when Jacobik was only eighteen. Calling it “a poem with twenty-three movements,” Jacobik moves backward and forward through time to explore the mistakes, grievances, chronic turbulence—and small, infrequent moments of redemption—that have marked the relationship between mother and child. With fierce honesty, Jacobik examines her mistakes and lapses as a mother, seeking a form of expiation through the eloquent and aching expression of her imperfect love.
by DB12 Nonfiction Author Michael Hemery from Silenced Press
No Permanent Scars reads how creative nonfiction should read: Like fiction. Like nonfiction. Like memoir. Like humor. Like literature. Like life. It’s about childhood, adulthood, the neighborhood and what it means to be a kid, a parent, a teacher, a human. Michael Hemery illuminates an honest working-class existence, offering both the sober realities of class discrimination and the humor and love of family. Intertwined with serious issues such as suicide, alcoholism, abuse, religion, and immigration, Hemery also endures a painfully slow and often naive coming of age (he once mistook an obvious prostitute for an office supply store employee). This is going to be the best book you’ll read this year. 